Posts Tagged ‘Citrix’

Tolly Group releases another Citrix vs. VMware comparison

April 15th, 2009

A few months ago, The Tolly Group released a report comparing Citrix and VMware VDI solutions.

They’re at it again. Today, The Tolly Group released another comparison. Today’s report compares Citrix XenServer 5 and VMware ESX 3.5.0 Update 3 with Citrix XenApp as the workload.

Citrix Systems commissioned Tolly to evaluate the performance of Citrix XenApp when running on Citrix XenServer 5 and compare that with XenApp running on VMware ESX 3.5u3.

Testing focused on system scalability and user quality-of-experience. This test report was approved for publication by VMware. The VMware End User License Agreement (EULA) requires such approval.

The testing was conducted in accordance with Tolly Common RFP #1101, Virtual Server Performance.

Summary of Results:

* Citrix XenServer 5 outperforms VMware ESX 3.5 by 41% in user scalability tests.
* XenApp, running on XenServer, retains a consistent user experience as load is increased to 164 users.
* Virtualizing 32-bit XenApp gives IT administrators a viable approach to increasing total user density on physical servers, without the need to re-certify their existing applications and drivers for a 64-bit platform.
* Consolidating XenApp farms on XenServer results in data center reliability benefits and cost savings.

Click here to download the report. You will need to register for the report download.

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Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI)

March 8th, 2009

I’m mildly excited for the upcoming week. If all goes well, I’ll be upgrading to AMD Opteron processors which support a virtualization assist technology called Rapid Virtualization Indexing (or RVI for short).

There is overhead introduced in VMware virtualization via the virtual machine monitor (VMM) and comes in three forms:

  1. Virtualization of the CPU (using software based binary translation or BT for short)
  2. Virtualization of the MMU (using software based shadow paging)
  3. Virtualization of the I/O devices (using software based device emulation)

RVI is found in AMD’s second generation of virtualization hardware support and it incorporates MMU (Memory Management Unit) virtualization. This new technology is designed to eliminate traditional software based shadow paging methods for MMU virtualization thereby reducing the overhead in bullet #2 above. VMware lab tests show that RVI provides performance gains of up to 42% for MMU-intensive benchmarks and up to 500% for MMU-intensive microbenchmarks.

How it works:

Software based shadow page tables store information about the guest VM’s physical memory location on the host. The VMM had to intercept guest VM page table updates to keep guest page tables and shadow page tables in sync. By now you can probably see where this is going: applications and VMs which had frequent guest page table updates were not as efficient as those with less frequent guest page table updates.

The above is similar to guest VM kernel mode calls/context switching to access CPU ring 0. Previously, the architecture wouldn’t allow it directly via the hardware so the VMKernel had to intercept these calls and hand-hold each and every ring 0 transaction. Throw 10,000+ ring 0 system calls at the VMKernel per second and the experience starts to become noticeably slower. Both Intel and AMD resolved this issue specifically for virtualized platforms by introducing a ring -1 (a pseudo ring 0) which guest VMs will be able to access directly.

VMware introduced support for RVI in ESX 3.5.0. RVI eliminates MMU related overhead in the VMM by relying on the technology built into the newer RVI capable processors to determine the physical location of guest memory by walking an extra level of page tables maintained by the VMM. RVI is AMD’s nested page table technology. The Intel version of the technology is called Extended Page Tables (EPT) and is expected sometime this year.

One of the applications of RVI that interests me directly is Citrix XenApp (Presentation Server). XenApp receives a direct performance benefit from RVI because it is an MMU-intensive workload. VMware’s conclusion in lab testing was that XenApp performance increased by approximately 29% using RVI. By way of the performance increase, we can increase the number of concurrent users on each virtualized XenApp box. There are two wins here: We increase our consolidation ratios on XenApp and we reduce the aggregate number of XenApp boxes we have to manage due to more densely populated XenApp servers. This is great stuff!

There is a caveat. VMware observed some memory access latency increases for a few workloads, however, they tell us there is a workaround. Use large pages in the guest and the hypervisor to reduce the stress on the Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB). VMware recommends that TLB-intensive workloads make extensive use of large pages to mitigate the higher cost of a TLB miss. For optimal performance, the ESX VMM and VMKernel aggressively try to use large pages for their own memory when RVI is used.

For more information and deeper technical jibber jabber, please see VMware’s white paper Performance of Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI). Something to note is that all testing was performed on ESX 3.5.0 Update 2 with 64 bit guest VMs. I give credit to this document for the information provided in this blog post, including two directly quoted sentences.

For some more good reading, take a look at Duncan Epping’s experience with a customer last week involving MMU, RVI, and memory over commit.

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Putting some money where my VMware mouth is

February 15th, 2009

I came home this afternoon from a Valentines Day wedding in North Dakota to find that my one and only workstation in the house (other than the work laptop) had a belated Valentines Day present for me:  It would no longer boot up.  No Windows.  No POST.  No video signal.  No beep codes.

DSC00473

I was feeling adventurous and I needed a relatively quick and inexpensive fix.  I decided to take one of the thin clients I received from Chip PC via VMworld 2008 plus a freshly deployed Windows XP template on the Virtual Infrastructure and promote this VDI solution to main household workstation status for the next few weeks.  The timing on this could not have been better.  The upcoming Minnesota VMUG on Wednesday March 11th is going to be VDI focused.  I guess I’ll have more to contribute at that meeting than I had originally planned on.  With any luck, Chip PC will be in attendance and we can discuss some things.

The thin client:  Chip PC Xtreme PC NG-6600 (model: EX6600N, part number: CPN04209).

Specs:

  • RMI – Alchemy Au 1550, 500MHz RISC processor (equivalent to 1.2GHz x86 TC processors)
  • 128MB DDR RAM
  • 64MB Disk-On-Chip with TFS
  • 128-bit 3D graphics acceleration engine with separate 2×8MB display memory SDRAM
  • Dual DVI ports each supporting 1920×1200 16-bit color.  Supports quad displays up to 1024×768
  • Audio I/O
  • 4 USB 2.0 ports
  • 10/100 Ethernet NIC
  • Power draw:  3.5W work mode, .35W sleep mode
  • OS:  Enhanced Microsoft Windows CE (6.00 R2 Professional)
  • Integrated applications (Plugins – note plugins are downloaded at no charge from the Chip PC website and are not, by default, embedded or included with the thin client – just enough OS concept)
    • Citrix ICA
    • RDP 5.2 and 6
    • Internet Explorer 6.0
    • VDM Client
    • VDI Client
    • Media Player
    • VPN Client
    • Ultra VNC
    • Pericom (Team Talk) Terminal Emulation
    • LPD Printer
    • ELO Touch Screen
  • Compatibility
    • Citrix WinFrame, MetaFrame, and Presentation Server 4.5
    • MS Windows Server 2000/2003
    • MS Windows NT 4.0 – TS Edition
    • VMware Virtual Desktop Interface using RDP
  • Full support of both local and network printers:  LPD, LPR, SMB, LPT, USB, COM
  • Support for USB mass storage (thumb drives – deal breaker for me)
  • Support for wireless USB NIC (not included)
  • etc. etc. etc.

DSC00474

Truth be told, this isn’t really a promotion in the sense that I had already performed extensive testing on it.  I hadn’t even taken the thing out of the box yet other than to register it for the extended warranty.  I’ve had only a little experience on these devices as I have an identical unit in the lab at work which I’ve spent a total of 30 minutes on.  To the best of my knowledge, this is the Cadillac unit from Chip PC.

I don’t have any fancy VDI brokering solutions here in the home lab and I’m not up to speed on VMware View so the plan is to leverage Thin Client -> RDP -> Windows XP desktop on VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3.5.

I think this is going to be a good test.  A trial by fire of VDI (granted, a fairly simple variation).  I spout a lot about the goodness that is VMware and now I’ll be eating some of my own dog food from the desktop workspace.  I’m a power user.  I’ve got my standard set of applications that I use on a regular basis and I’ve got a few hardware devices such as a flatbed scanner, iPod Shuffle, USB thumb drives, digital cameras, etc.  I should know within a short period of time whether or not this will be a viable solution for the short term.  Also add to the mix my wife’s career.  She uses our home computer to access her servers at work on a fairly regular basis.  Lastly, my wife sometimes works from home while I’m away at the office or traveling.  It’s going to be critical that this solution stays up and running and continues to be viable for my wife while I’m remote and not able to provide computer support.

So where am I at now?  I’ve got the VDI session patched along with my most critical applications installed to get me by in the short term:  Quicken, SnagIt, network printer, and Citrix clients.  I’ll install MS Office later but for now I can use the published application version of Office on my virtualized Citrix servers.  I’ve been listening some Electro House on www.di.fm on the VDI and music quality is as good as it was on my PC before it died, although it doesn’t completely drive my 5.1 surround in the den.  Pretty sure I’m getting 2.1 right now.  Oh well, at least the sub is thumpin.  Shhhh… the thin client is sleeping:

DSC00478

So what else?  As long as I’m throwing caution to the wind, I think it’s time to take the training wheels off VMware DPM (Distributed Power Management) and see what happens in a two node cluster.

2-15-2009 10-53-10 PM

Based on the environment below, what do you think will happen?  CPU load is very low, however, memory utilization is close to being over committed in a one host scenario. Will DPM kick in?

2-15-2009 10-53-59 PM

Most of my infrastructure at home is virtual including all components involving internet access both incoming and outgoing.  If the blog becomes unavailable for a while in the near future, I’ll give you one guess as to what happened.  :)

No matter what the outcome, vmwarenews.de aka Roman Haug – you are no longer welcomed to republish my blog articles.  Albeit flattering, the fact that you have not even so much as asked in the first place has officially pissed me off.  You publish my content as if it were your own, written by you as indicated by the “by Roman” header preceeding each duplicated post.  Please remove my content from your site and refrain from syndicating my content going forward.  Thank you in advance.

Update: Roman Haug has offered an apology and I believe we have reached an understanding.  Thank you Roman!

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VDI: VMware View 3 Premier vs. Citrix XenDesktop Enterprise 2.1

February 9th, 2009

VDI was hot in 2008 and it’s predicted to be even hotter in 2009.  On the heels of this prediction, VMware commissioned The Tolly Group to compare two VDI solutions head to head:  VMware View 3 Premier and Citrix XenDesktop Enterprise 2.1.  The Tolly Group has published their findings in an eight page report which you can grab here.  The results are not at all surprising:

Executive Summary

The VMware View 3 VDI solution deploys more simply and more rapidly than Citrix XenDesktop 2.1.  VMware provides more comprehensive, efficient image and storage management of virtual desktops.  It provides end users with a quality of experience on the LAN that matches or exceeds that offered by the Citrix solution.

The Tolly Group used a standard virtual desktop configuration for both test environments:

  • 1 CPU core
  • 512MB RAM
  • 8GB Hard disk drive storage
  • Microsoft Windows Media Player 9
  • Microsoft Office 2007 (full installation)
  • Microsoft Windows XP SP2

In their report, they confirm the following five facts as the bottom line:

VMware View 3:

  1. Installed more rapidly and with considerably fewer steps and less manual intervention
  2. Provides simpler image management that makes more efficient use of disk
  3. Requires no manual configuration of Microsoft Active Directory or DHCP
  4. Allows management of all VDI functions through a single web-based GUI
  5. Provides equivalent end-user experience on LAN as Citrix for Microsoft Office applications

Given the opportunity, Citrix declined to actively participate in the product comparisons.

2-9-2009 9-06-16 PM

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What I’m reading

December 31st, 2008

What I’m reading:

VMware Infrastructure 3:  Advanced Technical Design Guide and Advanced Operations Guide by Scott Herold, Ron Oglesby (formerly of GlassHouse, now with Dell, and bench presser of Lord knows how many pounds), and Mike Laverick. ISBN:  978-0971151086.

Ok, the truth is I’ve had the pre-release Author’s Edition of this book since February of 2008 and I had read a few chapters, but I haven’t read the final copy cover to cover like a book of this calibre warrants.  I picked up the final copy in September 2008 just before VMworld 2008.  If the author names sound familiar to you, well, they should.  Oglesby and Herold wrote the earlier version of this book a few years ago and it was dynamite!  Laverick joins the duo as a VMware Infrastructure expert, VMware instructor, proprietor of RTFM Eduction, plus extensive Citrix experience (the man has paid his dues).  Lately, Laverick has been on a VMware Site Recovery Manager kick.  If you’re getting into SRM, definitely check out Mike’s site where you’ll find valuable information plus the first and only book I’m aware of dedicated to SRM.

Expectations:  Advanced concepts.  Tips and tricks I won’t find in VMware documentation.  Real world scenarios from the datacenter and classroom.  At just over 800 pages, I would have been able to devour this in a week or less in my younger days.  With a busy family and work life, I expect I’ll be chipping away at this book for a good month or more.  But it’s not a race.  What’s important is understanding and retention of the concepts.  I’m thinking about the VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX) certification soon and hopefully this book will help in those studies.

What I’m watching:

VMware ESX Server training by Trainsignal.  Iman Jalali (Director of Sales and Support, Trainsignal) contacted me via Twitter and asked if I’d like to review a copy of Trainsignal’s latest VMware ESX video training.  Are you kidding me?  Just about anything VMware related I can get my hands on is a good thing.  Jalali did not ask for a blog review or even a mention, however, I appreciate his generosity as well as the generosity of Scott Skinger (Founder/President of Trainsignal) who comped me Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 video training back in 2007.

David Davis (from this and this, among other things) is the instructor of this 18+ hour 2-DVD series.  I’ve known (of) David for a few years from my participation at the Petri IT Knowledgebase.  David has a lot of positive energy and his certifications include CCIE (I’m not worthy sharing the same Oxygen as he) and VCP.  I very much look forward to watching this series.  One thing though guys (and this goes out to all the VMware book authors too):  With the virtualization landscape evolving so quickly, the versions and configuration maximums being rasied by VMware almost quarterly, I wish you the best of luck keeping your material current!  That has to be a big challenge and somewhat of a frustration at the same time.

It is now time for my Pre-New-Years cheesecake.  As if I needed an excuse for cheesecake.

Oh yeah, Happy New Year!

Jas

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Where to get timely VMware virtualization information

December 25th, 2008

Happy Holidays!  I thought tonight was the night I was going to post some “Citrix XenApp virtualized on VMware ESX” that many have been asking me for behind the scenes, but alas it’s 10:30pm and I just don’t have the energy for such a post that will require considerable effort to put together.  I’ve accumulated some information here and there for various people, but it’s time to formally consolidate the scattered pieces of information into one decent post that I can fine tune as needed going forward.  Before you start licking your chops in anticipation of a rocket science blog post on virtualizing Citrix, please don’t.  What I promise is the details and discoveries behind one person’s virtualized Citrix environment.  With VI3, virtualizing Citrix is fairly straightforward but extra special attention must be paid in determining virtualization candidacy.

Now I wouldn’t want anyone to walk away empty handed from my blog on Christmas so I leave you with this:  A no-frills post revealing the source of where I get 90-95% of my daily virtualization information – RSS feeds of various blogs and websites.  This file (right click, save as – it’s XML) contains an export of all of my RSS subscriptions.  Import it into your favorite RSS reader.  Set your RSS subscription refresh interval to 15 minutes.  Stay informed with nearly up to the minute and late breaking VMware virtualization news.  With new blogs and sites popping up weekly, for sure this list is nowhere near what I would call complete.  If you have any suggestions or if you see a great blog or site that I am missing, by all means, let me know in the comment section below.  I’m the type of guy that can never get enough VMware virtualization information.

Disclaimer:  My RSS subscription list contains a few subscriptions to non-virtualization related feeds which you may want to remove.

Update:  I’ve added two more great blogs to the RSS feeds:  Gabe’s Virtual World (Gabrie van Zanten) and Jase’s Place (Jason McCarty).

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Introducing: IT Knowledge Exchange/TechTarget

December 18th, 2008

Have you seen TechTarget’s IT Knowledge Exchange? If you are an IT staff member in search of answers or excellent technical blogs, ITKE is one site you’ll want to bookmark. Their award winning editorial staff include virtualization bloggers such as Eric Siebert, David Davis, prolific VirtualCenter plugin writer Andrew Kutz, Rick Vanover, Edward Haletky, and many more.

Search or browse by hundreds of tags covering hot IT topics such as Database, Exchange, Lotus Domino, Microsoft Windows, Security, Virtualization, etc.

Their value proposition is simple: provide IT professionals and executives with the information they need to perform their jobs—from developing strategy, to making cost-effective IT purchase decisions and managing their organizations’ IT projects.

One month ago, brianmadden.com was purchased by TechTarget. I think this addition will be a nice shot in the arm for ITKE. In one transaction they integrate an established rich Citrix/Terminal Services/Virtualization knowledgebase and talented staff of bloggers that it can in turn use to help its readers and advertising clientele.

TechTarget has over 600 employees, was founded in 1999, and went public in May 2007 via a $100M IPO.

12-18-2008 8-27-33 AM

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hgfs registry value causes issues with Terminal Services VMs

December 13th, 2008

I originally brought this up back in October with my Tip for virtualization Citrix servers invovling user profiles post.  I’m bringing it up again because this week VMware updated their knowledgebase document 1317 Windows Guest Cannot Update hgfs.dat and it’s missing a piece of key information that administrators need to be aware of.  I’m not going to rehash the whole hgfs registry value again.  You can read the details about that in my October post linked above.  The workarounds for hgfs issues caused by VMware Tools do work, however, what’s not mentioned is that a re-installation or upgrade of VMware Tools will re-install the hgfs value back in the registry thus introducing problems again.  With the amount of ESX/ESXi version upgrades coming from VMware lately, which in turn cause VMware Tools upgrades, this scenario is not going to be uncommon for anyone who is virtualizing Terminal Services or Citrix.  Add to that, VMware even recently released an interim VMware Tools upgrade patch subsequent to ESX 3.5.0 Update 3 (ESXe350-200811401-T-BG).

It should be noted that the hgfs registry value is associated with VMware shared folders technology (not used with ESX/ESXi) and only gets installed during a Complete installation type.  A Typical installation type will not install the hgfs registry value.  I perform Complete installation types of VMware Tools because I make use of the VMware Descheduled Time Accounting Service.  My virtualized Citrix servers have been impacted by this twice:  The first time when I orginally rolled out the virtualized Citrix servers.  The second time a few months later I discovered hgfs was installed again after a VMware Tools upgrade.  I’ve asked VMware to update hgfs related KB articles with the piece about the VMware Tools upgrades.  As I pointed out in my October article, one of the nasty side effects of the hgfs value on Terminal Services VMs is the constant growing of the user profile folders under \Documents and Settings\.  Left undiscovered for a while and it becomes a pretty big mess and the speed at which ugliness infiltrates \Documents and Settings\ is compounded by the number of Terminal Services users logging on to the server throughout the day every day.

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VMware product name changes

December 3rd, 2008

Quick update on a news item you may have already heard about. Remember those VMware product/component decoder rings you might have started working on after the VMworld 2008 announcements? It’s time for an update. VMware announced a handful of product name changes on Monday:

  1. VMware VirtualCenter is now VMware vCenter Server
  2. VMware vCenter is the family name for all management products
  3. VMware Lab Manager is now VMware vCenter Lab Manager (since it is in the management products family)
  4. The VMware vCenter prefix applies to the other products in the management products family as well
  5. VMware View is the family name for all VDI/VDM products
  6. VMware VDI is now VMware View
  7. VMware VDM is now VMware View Manager

I’m not real fond of name changes unless there is a good reason behind it. I’ll give VMware the benefit of the doubt that there was good reason to make these changes, although not knowing myself 100% what is up VMware’s sleeve, the timing is somewhat debatable. Couldn’t they have waited until the next generation of Virtual Infrastructure to align the products and components? Citrix did this with Presentation Server when they instantly re-branded it to XenApp. It confused a lot of people, especially the newcomers. I hope confusion among VMware customers is minimized. It’s going to take a little while for these new names to become second nature for me.

What do you think of the name changes? Feedback is always welcomed here.

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Confused about Citrix XenServer 5 support for Windows Server 2008

November 25th, 2008

I read a news item here stating Citrix XenServer 5 lacks support for Windows Server 2008 as a guest operating system. I decided to check it out for myself.

Citrix reveals here that indeed Windows Server 2008 guests are not supported in XenServer 5. However, the What’s new in Citrix XenServer 5 page explains that XenServer 5 is tuned for Windows and Windows Server 2008 guest support has been added through the all important Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP).

Confused? I am.

VMware supports Windows Server 2008 for many of its products and VMware is very clear about it. VMware’s guest OS support for all VMware products can be found in the Guest Operating System Installation Guide.

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Brian Madden purchased by TechTarget

November 19th, 2008

No, a human being was not purchased like a head of cattle (at least let’s hope not). Brian Madden has been a well known mogul in the Citrix community for quite a long time and has been making a splash lately in the virtualization arenas (primarily virtual desktop infrastructure where Citrix products XenApp and XenServer compete for market share along with VMware, Microsoft, and others).

Brian Madden uses his personal name as his product brand to become successful in many of his accomplishments including public speaking, industry analyst, technical author, blogger, knowledgebase website, creator of the impressive annual BriForum convention, book publisher, etc.

Brian is a wealth of knowledge first and foremost. I’ve read a few of his Citrix/Terminal Services books and he ranks right up there at the top among the most knowledgeable authorities when it comes to Citrix and Terminal Services. I also regard Brian as an interesting character with a unique and funny personality. Read some of his blogs about his adventures and you’ll understand. A year or two ago I followed Brian over the internet as he sold his house and most of his possessions and became a world traveler with no place to call home except for whatever hotel he was in at the time. When he sold his house ‘n’ things, he hired entertainment for the kids such as one of those big enclosed hot air trampolines you’d likely see at a carnival. I think he had a popcorn machine, food, hired clowns, etc. All at his expense. Nobody does it quite like Brian.

TechTarget is an IT media company founded in 1999 that has 600 employees and went public in 2007. TechTarget writes “The Brian Madden Company brings the largest community of IT professionals specializing in application delivery and desktop virtualization.” In one transaction, TechTarget purchases an already existing and established fountain of knowledge that it can in turn use to help its clients. However, I’m not sure about the accuracy of the last part of their statement if you consider the virtualization leader, VMware, has built a virtualization community of well over 100,000 people from around the globe.

I wish Brian and TechTarget much success now and into the future.

Read more about the official announcement from TechTarget here.

Update: Brian’s official announcement at brianmadden.com

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VMware releases ESX 3.5 Update 3 and ESXi 3.5 Update 3

November 6th, 2008

On Thursday November 6, 2008, VMware rolled out an incremental update of its bare metal hypervisor and flagship product:

  • VMware ESX 3.5 Update 3 (build 123630)
    • vCPU per core limit raised from 8 (11 for VDI) to 20
    • Newly supported hardware
    • Newly supported guest OS
      • Solaris 10 U5
      • Ubuntu 8.04.1
      • RHEL 4.7
    • Interrupt Coalescing (IC) for Qlogic 4Gb FC HBAs
    • Experimental support for the VMDK Recovery Tool (a script that helps recover VMFS/VMDK from accidental deletion or corruption)
    • Updated Small Footprint CIM Broker to v1.3.0
    • IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC) now supported with both Fixed and MRU fibre multipathing policies
  • VMware ESXi 3.5 Installable/Embedded Update 3 (build 123629)
    • vCPU per core limit raised from 8 (11 for VDI) to 20
    • Newly supported hardware
    • Newly supported guest OS
      • Solaris 10 U5
      • Ubuntu 8.04.1
      • RHEL 4.7
    • Interrupt Coalescing (IC) for Qlogic 4Gb FC HBAs
    • Updated Small Footprint CIM Broker to v1.3.0
    • IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC) now supported with both Fixed and MRU fibre multipathing policies

VMware Infrastructure 3 Documentation is still referencing ESX as ESX Server which I don’t understand. VMware made it clear that the word “Server” was dropped from the bare metal hypervisor product many months ago. I guess name changes are easier said than done (except in the case of Citrix where Presentation Server customers might remember waking one morning and suddently everything on the website was called XenApp with no trace of Presentation Server left – talk about confusing.)

Head to VMware’s download site now

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Tip for virtualizing Citrix servers involving user profiles

October 25th, 2008

I virtualize Citrix servers and have had great success since VI3 was released. One of the things I learned along the way was a conflict that was created when introducing VMware Tools to a Citrix server.

My Citrix users receive mandatory profiles when their first session is established with the Citrix server. Although the user is assigned a mandatory read only profile which lives in an isolated directory on each Citrix server, a profile bearing the user’s account name is still created under \Documents and Settings\<username>\. This is normal Windows Terminal Services behavior. Now, what’s supposed to happen is when the user logs off their Citrix session, the automatically created profile is supposed to be automatically deleted. However, the installation of VMware Tools will prevent the clean up and deletion of the profile. The next time that user logs on, a new profile folder is created with a .001 extension. Then .002.  Then .003.  And so on.  On a larger scale with many users logging on and logging off, many profile folders are created and then orphaned. Left undiscovered, several hundred orphan folders will be discovered within just a day or two depending on how many sessions the Citrix server handles.

The root cause is that a file named \Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\VMware\hgfs.dat cannot be deleted by Windows and thus the folder structure must remain in place. The VMware Tools installation is partly responsible for the conflict. When VMware Tools is installed, it appends a value in the Windows registry to

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\

SYSTEM\

CurrentControlSet\

Control\

NetworkProvider\

Order\

ProviderOrder

The value of hgfs is appended.

The fix is simple. Right-click ProviderOrder and choose Modify. In the Edit String Value dialog box, edit the value data string and remove the characters ,hgfs (including the leading comma). For example, if the data string contains LanmanWorkstation,hgfs then change it to LanmanWorkstation. If the value data string contains only hgfs, then erase it and leave the value data string empty.

Problem solved. Unfortunately only for the time being. The next time you upgrade VMware Tools on the Citrix VM, hgfs will be appended back in the registry and once again an accumulation of folders under \Documents and Settings\ will begin.

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